Simplified SEO

By Sef
Posted On
Saturday, January 18, 2014
//

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is one of the essential methods to drive relevant traffic, increase your revenue and make your company stand out in organic search in terms of ranking and CTR click through rates. Also, to strengthen your website’s presence within its industry, build authority and establish trust from your target audience.

We all know that
SEO industry have changed several times and still changing, in terms of making
a website gain more exposure, reputation, authority within its industry and
more importantly, ethical optimization which follows and adhere to search
engine guidelines. We all know this can be done in some difficult ways; but there
are some methods to do it without having to worry of being penalized in terms of optimizing your website to help search engines understand what really your website is about.

Let’s get
started..

Optimizing your
website is the most important part of SEO, making your website more indexable,
crawlable and more importantly, user friendly website where your visitors will
not be confused during their visit on your website. Having said that,
performing the following recommended optimization issues need to be implemented
on any website.

Create appealing meta-data

Meta data
provides relevant information to search engines of what pages your website is
about. This helps them understand and identify what content your pages have
based on your meta-title and meta-description. And by providing well-written
meta-data can help you get more CTR and better position in SERP.

Tips in creating meta-data:

Include your
brand name in your title tag

Use all characters and be very creative in writing description of your pages

Provide in-depth articles

Creating
comprehensive articles for your audience won’t only help you gain their trust
but this can also help you earn links that you deserve over time. Also,
appearing in in-depth article section of SERP in your industry will obviously
help you get decent amount of organic clicks which are obviously your target
audience. However, appearing in in-depth articles section of Google may require
some technical task. But this guide from Google can help you get the job done.

Create Hummingbird Friendly Articles

Content is
definitely the most important factor that Google looks at when analyzing a
website’s worth aside from inbound links. With that being said, providing
content that will still be useful to your audience over a period of time is
definitely important. Since you don’t want to create content that have
expiration date or seasonal content which only lasts for a specific time frame.

Since you want
Google to love your website in terms of providing useful content, write
something that will give high value to your audience which is the main goal of
search engines, to help their audience
get the answers they need.

We all know that
not all types of content are created equal. If you are building your authority
through your content, make sure that you write unique, remarkable and useful
piece for your audience such as content ideas below:

Educational

Conversational

In-depth analysis

Case studies

Implement Semantic Markup

Another
important technical SEO approach is to implement structured data on your
website to have it appeared appealing on SERP. Although it does not help you
with your rankings, it helps your website attract visitors by highlighting
information from your website in SERP via reach snippets.

Implement authorship markup

Appearing your
professional photo on SERP right before your content is definitely an important
thing to keep in mind when optimizing your website. This can help you show your
full ownership to your content and at the same time, establish your authority
in your industry. More importantly, people tend to be bias on their clicks;
they only prefer to click on the results with authorship markup implemented, so
having your website with Google Authorship markup setup is very crucial.

Implementing authorship
markup isn’t very hard to accomplish as Google provides all the requirements
and tool needed when setting up your very own authorship markup and these are
as follows:

Requirements

Google+ profile
with your professional photo

Website or Blog

The Process

Edit the
contributor section of your Google+ account which is visible in the about
section of your profile, add the link of your website to the URL section

Ensure that your
Google+ URL is linked in the Author Bio section of your content to make this
work.

So make sure
that your Google+ URL is included on all website that you are contributing to
show full credit of ownership on your Google+ profile.

Internal linking

Connecting your
pages internally based on relevancy is really vital in terms of SEO as this
will help crawlers discover other pages on your website through links. Also, this
can make your visitors stay longer on your website as they go through your
content and click on the links within your content. Having said that, here are
some important tactics to keep in mind when internally linking your pages such
as:

Add your
important pages’ links to visible part of your website such as footer links

Use your articles
to link your pages

Implement
breadcrumbs

By implementing
internal linking on your website can help you distribute the ranking power of
your pages to other pages of your website and establish information hierarchy on
your website.

Implement breadcrumbs

One helpful way
to help your visitors don’t get confused and easily backtrack your audience’s
adventure on your website is to provide them track their location. This can
help improve your website’s internal linking and semantic markup on your
website.

This type of
navigation is really useful for ecommerce websites as websites that have
thousands of links can be really confusing to some people who are not
internet-savvy. So implementing breadcrumbs navigation to help your visitors
browse on your website is definitely important.

Final word

By focusing
on-page SEO and providing useful content for your website is definitely much
better than building hundreds of artificial links to your website as you are
not even sure of it will benefit you a lot from it. Therefore,optimizing your website to make search
engines understand your content is really important to get the right people
from the right place. Implementing important SEO techniques to make your
website standout in your industry can help you outrank your competitors in
SERP. You only need to be very creative and intelligent to providing
information that will be displayed on your website whether it is via rich
snippets or a whole bunch of article.

Joseph Gojo Cruzis the author ofRankingElite, aPhilippine-based Online Marketing
blog. Joseph has been working inSEOindustry for over 3 years fromwebsite audit,link and content development,social mediaandsearch
engine optimization. Connect with Joseph on Google+, Twitter,
and Facebook. Joseph is also a contributor
onSEJ
and Ahrefs.